I've never been as afraid of fresh water shortage as a lot of other people seem to be precisely because it is exactly the kind of shortage that is solved by market forces. Freshwater getting scarce? OK, so the price goes up. Now there's more incentive to conserve water by replacing fixtures for low-flow variants, letting your lawn die (why do you really need one in a desert anyway), and using more efficient irrigation methods in agriculture. The price of water still keeps going up? Then the price of meat goes up because growing crops to feed animals become more expensive, and people eat less meat. Meanwhile, increased price makes desalination more profitable, and more plants come online.

I don't see it as anything rising close to a civilization-ending threat. Seawater is abundant. Freshwater can be made cheaply enough. We are extravagantly wasteful with water as it is, and that can be fixed easily enough as it becomes more expensive.

People in the West believe that it was about "freedom", but it was about food and life getting so expensive normal people needed to spend most of their salary just on it. Poor people not being able to eat well or not eat at all as there were no jobs.

People will revolt if they can't buy food because it is very expensive. That is the civilization ending treat: war.

War is really the worst experience you could experience. I will remember things I have seen in Congo all my life.

For example WWII was created because Germans lived a miserable life paying for WW1 and Great depression. Just interest in the WW1 debt grew faster than their productivity meaning they were slaves forever, just like Greece is today.

Americans were very careful not making the compensation for war for Germany excessive in order not to repeat History.

People will choose whoever person that promises an easy exit for their problems, and the easiest thing is to steal from others. You don't have water, you take the places that have water, like the Golan heights.

And that is war.

For market forces to work you need a long time. Inventors will only discover innovative methods after working for decades in a problem.

Letting your lawn die? This is a really stupid idea. I have worked in Sahara desert precisely helping people stop the desert just putting vegetation in place(that holds sand and makes soil so wind does not move it).

The Arab Spring happened precisely in those countries that were already totalitarian and dysfunctional anyway. If not this crisis it could've just as easily been something else, like what's going on in Turkey right now. A lot of the Middle East petro-states are only propped up by their oil wealth, the profits on which go mostly to the elites, with token handouts and subsidies for everyone else. They've already had to subsidize food and water for a long time in order to prevent their societies from revolting, and increased costs due to desalination is thus only a difference in degree, not kind. As for the World War II comparison, well, the world is simply different now in a huge number of ways. So while I don't disagree with the examples you bring up, I just don't see them being relevant to developed democratic societies, which I believe can solve these problems. A lot of the remainder already has problems anyway, and water scarcity is one of a laundry list of problems on their plate, which also includes displacement due to rising sea levels, climate change, you name it.

As for letting your lawn die, what I really meant but didn't say because it doesn't sound as pithy is to replace your lawn with landscaping or native flora that require much less water to maintain. There are many parts of California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other places that are all essentially desert, and rapidly tend back towards desert in the absence of voluminous irrigation. It makes no sense to waste thousands of liters of water per lawn per day keeping non-native grasses alive in the middle of a desert. For the cost of only several months' water you can replace your yard with something that doesn't need watering and won't blow away in a storm, the simplest and cheapest replacement being gravel.

Were the actually capitalist? When I think of the Middle East monarchies dominated by an inherited nobility that controls all of the wealth and gives handouts to keep the lower class from revolting, "capitalism" is not what comes to mind.

I feel like I'm being mistaken for a staunch libertarian here, so I want to point out that I'm not that at all. I do think there is a big role for government investment to play in society, including in providing drinkable freshwater. This was the Israeli solution, and it's increasingly going that way in California as well. I'm not advocating for strict market-force-only supply-and-demand, but rather just pointing out that wasteful uses of water will go down as the price of water goes up, which it should be allowed to do rather than being subsidized in order to control wasteful uses. The cost of having enough water to drink and to cook with is measured in the low cents per day per person in the US. A single penny gets you over two gallons from the faucet where I live. And I'm in favor of safety net programs to prevent people from dying from illness, hunger, or thirst.

I think the point here is as in Israel, there needs to be a system, government, and culture that makes a free market possible. In the case where such a system is corrupt or instead offloads the costs onto another group of people, such a system falls apart and you have revolution as a result.

Exactly. While the parent comments correctly claim that many Middle-Eastern countries are technically capitalist, they do not provide a fair system where anyone with the capital can set up shop and start offering products/services. There is a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and often lack of property protections that scare away genuine capital.

That's crony capitalism, which is what you also have in Putin's Russia. The government decides which private enterprises will succeed, and in return the owners give the governmental officials their political support and immense bribes. It is not nearly as efficient and adaptive as the considerably less corrupt version of capitalism in Israel or the US.

When it comes to agriculture and industry (the largest consumers, by far) demand and supply isn't as elastic as you make it out to be. And that's exacerbated by volatility, both in demand but especially in supply--a drought isn't always a slow decline or even a simple precipitous drop in supply but often manifests in wild fluctuations.

That kind of environment makes capital investments, including investments in such things as desalination and power plants, risky and thus quite costly. So it's no surprise that most of these desalination plants are either government owned or otherwise heavily subsidized. That's not exactly the outcome one would expect of the free market if it were as simple as implementing a proper pricing scheme.

Rather, I think the takeaway is that water is one of those areas that proves that while the laws of supply & demand are utterly inviolable, price signaling can't always be readily accomplished through basic monetary schemes. Because of far reaching and pervasive externalities that make price signaling difficult. (Consumer pricing is obviously well suited but only the tip of the iceberg.) And because the capital investments required push the envelope of what the capital markets can efficiently handle. And yet because water is so fundamental its one of those areas where even governments (at least, well-functioning governments) can be relatively responsive. Those that don't handle it well tend to be winnowed out rather quickly--either by change of government or just societal collapse.

By "monetary" I meant pricing in cash or equivalents, generally between individual economic agents. I don't know what the correct terminology might be.

I was alluding to the fact that politics is also a kind of market for price signaling. Regulatory schemes are a signal to either reduce supply (literally, as in the Federal regulatory scheme for the wholesale electricity market) or to otherwise stop externalizing some cost. Economists quantify that in terms of the effect on market pricing because it's a much more useful and mature model for analytical purposes, but fundamentally that's just semantics. Political power is subject to the dynamic forces of economic laws like anything else, we just lack the ability to quantify it as well.

I like to think of government as just another large firm, and its product is legitimacy. Government does have the power of violence, but from a regulatory perspective (as opposed to criminal law perspective) that's often irrelevant in the aggregate. For example, in San Francisco there are many thousands of illegal in-law units. But never would the government go around house-to-house to enforce the law, and rarely do so even when given notice. The politicians would be voted out of office the moment anybody caught wind of such a thing.

The problem with water is the externalities, some of which are extremely difficult to price. So it's irrelevant that we can use e.g. futures markets to mitigate volatility.

Imagine that overnight somebody said that Silicon Valley is unsuitable for technology firms. Everybody needs to get up and go somewhere else. We could probably price the immediate effect fairly easily--cost of relocation, for example. But now consider that the economy of the entire Bay Area and indeed of all of California depends heavily on the technology economy. What's the cost of all the unemployed engineers who didn't get relocated? The cost to the companies and people serving the tech industry? The cost to the state of not only lost revenue, but of past and present budget allocations. Of unemployment? Of crime? Of the path-dependent evolution of economies, generally? Some of that is impossible to know given our current understanding.

And how do we internalize some of the benefit that will accrue to where ever those companies migrate to? Theoretically that should be possible, and ideally that would be done to minimize disruption.

Now imagine somebody told you that if the government intervened and did X, Y, and Z, then the tech industry was viable and could stay, at least for the time being. At best everything will continue as before, at worst there'll be a moderately slow wind down. But in any event things will be much more stable.

What do you think is going to happen? Are we (society) going to choose to develop a futures market for pricing the volatility, or are we going to turn to government?

Whatever we do, the environmental forces against the tech firms will remain, it's the mechanisms we employ to manage the direct and especially indirect costs that is different.

That's water in a nutshell for many areas of the world. For example, the entire economy of the Central Valley of California is dependent on agriculture. In total dollars the immediate benefit of agriculture to the California economy is surprisingly small. But there's a reason California bends over backwards to sustain the industry. It's not just about corporate campaign money. Again, the industry is small by dollar amount. And if the costs of sustaining agriculture were so inefficient you can be sure other corporations would be using their political donations to fight such laws.

After all, it's _easy_ to import water. We don't need futures markets for water, or even to build desalination plants. Certainly not in California where there's more than enough water for residential use. The most efficient solution to drought is to import industrial and agricultural products which rely on water. But for various reasons there's a limit to how far countries wish to go down that track, or at least how quickly they want to.

> And that's exacerbated by volatility, both in demand but especially in supply

This is usually dealt within the framework of commodity markets and the purchase of futures, but you won't be able to buy water there. We have abused water as a resource and created water rights for millenia.

Xeriscaping a lawn in an attractive way is significantly more expensive than laying sod or grading+seeding. Simply letting native weeds grow takes years and you're left with massive erosion problems in the meantime. In many locales, regulatory agencies will crack down severely if your yard is producing erosion run-off because it clogs sewer lines and clouds streams. A lawn of native weeds also looks pretty bad.

Xeriscaping is a fine option and when done right, it looks gorgeous...but doing it right is beyond the means of the average homeowner.

Laying sod, grading and seeding only became cheap due to volume demand and peer pressure; it could swing the other way, once momentum was gained. Lawn care could become more fulfilling in taking care of different plants. One man's weed is another man's salad. It's all in what you have become accustomed to in your life.

Personally, I have never maintained a lawn. Unlike my neighbors, I didn't cut down almost all of the native trees, so I have native landscaping, and it looks 100X better than flat, mowed lawn. It has wildflowers, and 'weeds' that flower and add to the beauty. I simply rake leaves in the fall, and keep my walkway clear to the house with stone from my property.

The way manicured lawns and homogeneous homes depicted in Tim Burton's 'Edward Scissorhands' film was spot on to me except in real life most condo communities would not allow the differently colored houses, or at least limit the palette. I grew up in Brooklyn, but found this out when I tried to change my carburetor in my mother-in-laws driveway, and I was told you cannot work on your car in your own driveway. No thanks to that life!

It's actually way cheaper to simply pave a yard on a new construction house with gravel than to sod it and install an irrigation system, which is essentially required in the kinds of deserts I'm talking about.

I know if I were buying a new house today, one of which had several hundreds of dollars per month in required water costs to keep the lawn alive, and one of which did not, I'm going with the latter one every time. Especially because you know the lawn is going to die on the former anyway at some point in the future when more severe water restrictions come into play and watering your lawn is (rightfully) prohibited.

We've done all three to our yard in Oakland, and its great. We xeriscaped most of our yard, with plants fed by drip irrigation. We put in a small patch of grass (about 300 square feet) with a sod called "native no-mow" that is literally that: it gets long and we don't mow it. We do have to weed it occasionally. The rest is covered in gravel.

The project wasn't cheap, but it wasn't that outrageously expensive, either, especially not compared to the cost of housing. We have to irrigate some, but nothing like what a lawn would need. And we have a nice outdoor space to hang out and entertain in, way nicer than concrete.

Or weeds. I've noticed parts of my lawn that got infested by chinch bugs died off but were replaced by weeds. The weeds were a combination of dandelions, clover, and other east coast weeds. I mow over the weed patches and they look just like cut grass. I wouldn't mind a whole weed lawn if the HOA and my partner didn't care as well.

A lot of cities in the US that are experiencing severe drought have prohibited watering lawns. So they won't fine you for letting them die, just the opposite -- they'll fine you if they catch you watering your lawn to keep it green.

"If we let our lawns die, we'll see more property damage due to soil erosion."

I've heard this before, and I've tried to imagine how that would work. The lawns I see in just about every city, most of them are surrounded by streets and usually sidewalks and sometimes curbs, too.

I try imagine what'd happen if the grass all just died and soil erosion started to kick in. Where's the soil going that's now going to erode? Is it liquefying in heavy rains and flowing up and away over the roads?

I just can't picture how lawns are doing all that much to prevent soil erosion, but would love a more detailed explanation.

Flash floods during monsoon season could definitely play their part in that, but I imagine wind has a lot to do with it too. Without grass to keep everything in place and help hold the moisture in, the wind picks up the dry soil pretty easily. Dust in heavy wind is kind of like a low-powered sand blaster, so property damage is a legitimate concern there too.

It's not entirely zero though. I learned/was reminded of this by 'Capital in the 21st century': Poor people make up society, when they are pushed over a certain line of comfort they will apply pressure to the system to rectify.

In these situations rectification can mean one of several things: Decapitating all who are or seem to be in power or inflating currency until being rich loses its meaning.

Obviously those two solutions are not very attractive to the capitalist market players, so there is an incentive to form structure with the goal of sustaining society. Though history shows capitalist markets are not good (enough) at forming that structure (thus their heads roll).

Value, or market forces, supply and demand are inherent in any system where the numbers of people of more than a few are involved.

The poor don't get priced out and die as you write. A potential market attracts problem solvers, yes, to make a profit (not a dirty word always), and new solutions are found to new problems - that is technology. Sometimes it creates new problems, hopefully less of a problem, and the cycle continues. Look at Cuba for what happens when you are cut off from trade, don't allow individuals to decide what they want to be when they grow up, and don't utilize technology and your natural resources efficiently.

I don't think any system, Capitalism, Socialism, what have you, allow you to meet and greet 7 billion people and get to know them to determine what is best for each individual, so yes, I'll go with market forces, supply and demand unless you have the ability to create something from nothing. These things emerge for the most part, and are not fully intentional constructs.

No, you've never been afraid of water shortages because you live in a first world country and earn thousands of dollars per month, plain and simple. If you were living with 2$ a day and rising food costs meant a meal cost 3$ I would like to see you sing a different tune about "food is expensive? just eat less meat and let "the market" figure it out".

When prices rise, the result is that the poor have less. The poor will have less water and less food, and those that are already on the edge will dip below what they really need. "People" won't eat less meat; poor people will eat less meat. As the share of income spent on food is much higher for the poor to begin with, they will feel the worst of it. You really don't want to go back to the days when class differences manifested in basic nutrition.

You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity, including water. The economy is the way it is because of millions of individual decisions that factored in volumes of information that you could not fathom. Creating a law that with a stroke of a pen overrides the decisions of millions of people on resource usage, based on a simplistic formula created by a couple hundred people in a legislature, is incredibly reckless.

> You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity, including water.

That depends on how it is done, Venezuela showed how not to do it. I think a good option is to also provide commodities by non-profit companies run by the state and then use their costs plus a profit margin as a cap for commercial competition. If water, electricity and basic foods become too expensive people suffer and one finally will face revolts - which pure commercial entities are not necessarily incentivized to prevent (just pulling out of a market when the suffering becomes too great might be more cost efficient for them).

Venezuela did enough damage where it becomes obvious that intervention fails. Just because the damage done by intervention is not apparent, doesn't mean it's not there. It's the hidden damage, that is caused by milder forms of authoritarian intervention, like that seen in mixed economies, that is the most dangerous, because it is not diagnosed and cured so it continues sapping the economic growth of the country for decades on end.

>one finally will face revolts -

One should not be cowed into instituting authoritarian measures. If there is a law-and-order issue, that should be dealt with directly by punishing violent protest.

So the "most dangerous" interventions are the ones that are so subtle we can't see the damage they cause?

I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.

I do love the untestable nature of this assertion, too. The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it. This is analogous to claiming that microwave ovens increase the risk of cancer, even though we can't detect it.

Yes exactly. They are allowed to continue hurting the economy for decades.

>I would have thought the most dangerous interventions were ones that tanked the economy and caused widespread poverty and desperation. But yeah, slightly reduced economic output sounds worse.

The compounding effect of slightly reduced economic growth adds up to a lot over the long term. Much more than a big one or two year drop in GDP. You can do the math and see what I mean.

>The underlying claim here is that all interventions cause economic damage, even if we can't detect it.

To clarify, you probably can detect it but like all economic phenomena, we don't have absolute proof that so-and-so economic policy was the cause of the damage. We only have a reasonable cause to believe it is the cause.

The problem is that the majority of the electorate are not well-versed in economics so unless the damage is extremely obvious they're not going to react properly and correct the harmful policy..

There are better ways to prevent violent revolution than instuting socialist policies. Three decades of 2% lower per year economic growth adds up to 80% of the base year's GDP. I imagine that at a much lower cost, you could prevent revolution.

And you're totally misunderstanding my position. I am arguing for economic development because it is the most effective means of saving and enriching human life.

2% lower growth is huge. I'm pretty sure this isn't something that would go unnoticed for decades. You're arguing that minute interventions have enormous effects that everyone is just to incompetent to measure and so wet need to appeal to beliefs rather than data.

There is no way to easily show the electorate that the policies are responsible for 2% less growth per year. The policies that affect growth are instituted gradually over the course of many decades. It is not obvious that the growth rates would be higher if those policies were not in place and there are huge vested interests who spend considerable amounts of resources on propaganda to convince people that those policies are not responsible for slowing growth. So the electorate is not going to necessarily be motivated to repeal those policies.

>You're arguing that minute interventions have enormous effects

First of all, not all the interventions are minute. Social Security or Medicare redistribution, is not minute. But the effects take a long time to manifest themselves. Lower levels of private sector investment only manifest themselves as less growth in GDP statistics years later, and can even boost GDP statistics in the short run.

Second, thousands of minute interventions over the course of decades do have enormous effects.

> It is not obvious that the growth rates would be higher if those policies were not in place

You're right. It's extremely nonobvious, because you're not making an argument from a position of fact but from a position of principle. Which is my point.

If GDP is 80% lower than it should be, I think you'd be able to demonstrate that.

You know who had experienced absurd GDP growth? China. Not that I think the Chinese model is what we should strive for, but I don't know how interventionism is clearly bad when interventionist governments like China have been growing so aggressively.

>It's extremely nonobvious, because you're not making an argument from a position of fact but from a position of principle. Which is my point.

It is not obvious because it would require a person reading many pages of dense economic data. Obviously the average voter is not going to do that.

>but I don't know how interventionism is clearly bad when interventionist governments like China have been growing so aggressively.

China's economic growth increased substantially after it instituted pro-market reforms in the early 1980s. It also imposes far lower levels of income redistribution in the form of social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP.

> You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity

Source?

Is it possible the unfathomably complex economic machine will simply adapt to the subsidy? If the subsidy was limited to a couple liters per person per day (e.g., sufficient to ensure survival), could this be less reckless than letting people die of dehydration?

My childhood was during the last years of Soviet Union. I saw first hand how incredible was damage from price control and government distributing food and basic necessities. Everything disappeared. Often in shops there was only empty shelves and when thing came one has to spend hours in a queue. It is so sad watching Venezuela going the same path with the same disastrous results.

There's a vast continuum between the Soviet Union and modern Western economies, all heavily regulated. It's not a binary choice. Food, in particular, is subsidized in most prosperous countries. Today we know that both Soviet-style communism and Hayek-style free-marketism have the annoying tendency to result in people starving, which is why both approaches have been rejected by Western countries, that, in general, try to aim at some middle ground.

>Today we know that both Soviet-style communism and Hayek-style free-marketism have the annoying tendency to result in people starving

It's very annoying when people make bold statements like this without any evidence or factual support. Please provide some examples of free market economics leading to people starving.

>which is why both approaches have been rejected by Western countries, that, in general, try to aim at some middle ground.

I don't know if you know this but Sweden was the most free market economy in the world from 1870 to 1950. After it adopted social welfarism in the 1970s, its growth stagnated. It fell from being the third richest country in the world to the 17th. Imagine how much higher its standard of living would be today if it had maintained the rate of economic development it had in the early 20th century.

You assume that since Western electorates have chosen a particular path, it is the optimal path. I see that as hubristic.

> Please provide some examples of free market economics leading to people starving.

In a completely free market, how does someone without money not starve?

> I don't know if you know this but Sweden was the most free market economy in the world from 1870 to 1950. After it adopted social welfare is in the 1970s, its growth stagnated.

I have no idea if this is even remotely true, but I'll assume for a moment that it is. Does the fact that Sweden adopted welfare not tell you something about the consequences of their free markets? The free market was just so awesome that they passed welfare for all the rich Swedes who didn't need it?

You can't compare the isolated instances of people starving in developing free market economies, e.g. the US circa 1880, to the mass starvation and economic strangulation caused by communism.

>Does the fact that Sweden adopted welfare not tell you something about the consequences of their free markets?
The free market was just so awesome that they passed welfare for all the rich Swedes who didn't need it?

People are shortsighted when voting. They are easily misled by election promises that give them short-term benefits at the expense of long-term development.
In the long run it is much better to sacrifice short-term benefits for greater long-term growth period that will maximize the rise in standard of living and life expectancy.

Because you have zero risk bias. Faster economic development reduces overall risk of mortality more rapidly than lower rates, and there is good theoretical and empirical reason to believe the unadulturated free market maximizes the rate of economic development. This holds true even if risk of starvation is not zero percent in an unadulterated free market.

This is logical extrapolation, and it's more or less validated by empirical evidence. It's not scientifically proven because we're dealing with incredibly complex phenomena where there are always potential confounding factors, but a reasonable case can still be made based on real world events.

See Venezuela for an extreme example of the consequences of interventionism.

The theory that intervention does harm is based on the fact that this complex system we know as an economy exists the way it does because of carefully weighted decisions of millions of people, each trying to meet their own needs in the most efficient manner available to them that does not cause harm to others (since harmful action is generally illegal in a market economy [there are edge cases of courses, like misleading advertising]). That carefully wrought symphony of welfare-maximizing human interaction is crudely disrupted by authoritarianism any time a legislature signs a law in effect that forces millions to act a certain way, that they otherwise would not have, or refrain from engaging in some voluntary interaction that they otherwise would have engaged in.

An authoritarian intervention to force several million to do some action to benefit several other million is going to have innumerable unintended consequences, that could not possibly be a net positive for the world.

Whoa, authoritarianism? Who said anything about authoritarianism? All prosperous economies are quite heavily regulated. You sound like that messianic group in the 40s and 50s of Milton Friedman, Mises, Hayek and friends who believed that the market solves everything. No one is proposing communism; no need to dig up the politics of the Mont Pelerin Society.

All regulations on voluntary market activity are a form of prohibition, where engaging in some voluntary activity is punished by prison sentences or expropriation of wealth. That is textbook authoritarian intervention. Just because it is popular and the most powerful countries do it does not mean it is not authoritarian.

I don't believe that markets will solve everything but I do believe that the best chance we have to solve problems is through voluntary market action as opposed to authoritarian action.

The vast majority of such justifications are hollow, and usually premised on the idea that adults are too incompetent to make correct consumer, employment, etc decisions for themselves. E.g. laws against selling dangerous products like drugs to adults. The arguments for such laws are only appealing to the sound-bite digesting 20-second-attention-span crowd. I'd argue that they'd never stand in a court of law.

Eh, depends on the law in question. Banking regulations, for example, protect consumers and the broader economy from short sighted actions in the part of bankers. I don't think the justifications are hollow given the history.

> and usually premised on the idea that adults are too incompetent to make correct consumer, employment, etc decisions for themselves.

Well, if you believe citizens are too short sighted to vote rationally, then I don't know how you can argue that they are not too short sighted to make other decisions rationally.

But more to the point, some laws are truly intended to protect people from their own decisions (often in the context of hardships, such as usury laws), but many are intended to protect society as a whole, where the belief is that individuals are harmed collectively by the actions of others.

> E.g. laws against selling dangerous products like drugs to adults.

I don't feel like drug laws and market regulations have much in common.

>Eh, depends on the law in question. Banking regulations, for example, protect consumers and the broader economy from short sighted actions in the part of bankers. I don't think the justifications are hollow given the history.

A regulation that prevents me as an adult from investing in a high risk instrument is not protection against aggression (which is a justifiable prohibition). It is nanny state authoritarianism and denies me as a banking customer options because of an assumption on the part of busy-bodies that I can't be trusted to make wise investment decisions for myself.

>Well, if you believe citizens are too short sighted to vote rationally, then I don't know how you can argue that they are not too short sighted to make other decisions rationally.

Can't you see that this argument can be made more compellingly against your position than mine? If you think consumers are not smart enough even to make purchasing decisions for themselves, how could you possibly entrust them with to elect politicians that will impose thousands of force backed mandates and prohibitions on the economy, that intimitaly affect every aspect of our lives, and determine the winners and losers among thousands of companies?

Either we accept the precepts of liberal democracy, and assume an adult has a right to determine their own path in life, or we give into fascism and make decisions for them. If we choose the latter, there's no principled reason to preserve the right of the masses to vote.

All of the arguments given for prohibitions on mutually voluntary actions to "protect society" or "protect consumers" seems like hollow justifications for authoritarianism to me.

Justification for restricting individual actions should be based on empirical study of whether or not they harm others, not on an a priori creed that appeals some simplistic logic. What constitutes a free decision cannot be decided by the decree of a mid-20th-century fringe think-tank. For example (although this example, too, is very simplistic), capturing a bird and putting it in a cage restricts its individual freedom. But if it is discovered empirically that 98% of birds of that kind are unable to resist the draw to some sound at a particular frequency, then playing that sound is also a restriction of their freedom. In other words, "free" is not defined by math, but by the actual study of the behavior of actual people in actual societies. I'm not claiming that careful studies are always or even usually, conducted, but nor is it the case that freedom is defined arbitrarily.

>Justification for restricting individual actions should be based on empirical study of whether or not they harm others, not on an a priori creed that appeals some simplistic logic.

Harm others or harm themselves? Or are you referring to the restrictions themselves, and whether they harm others? I don't think the threat of imprisonment should be used to restrict human action that is nonviolent. This is not just libertarianism. This is common sense and basic decency.

As for private property rights and their scientific justification: they are the manifestation of the first possession principle that is found in game theory experiments to be an emergent behavior that maximizes social welfare, and which even other animals exhibit.

Violating property rights, by prohibiting financial transactions outside of state licensed banks, or demanding a percentage of all earnings made in private trade be transferred to politically appointed authorities, is often a great contributor to the concentration of wealth, and maintains the status quo, so your intuition that anti-authoritarianism and private property rights serves the rich is wrong.

Just to give concrete examples from humans, it is not clear to me why private property is an a priori untouchable liberty, while economic pressure is declared to be kosher and categorically different from physical pressure. Both require actual empirical study of their interaction with human behavior to determine which is an essential freedom and which isn't. In fact, there seems to be no logical justification at all for the categorization done in this Mont Pelerin tradition. Rather it seems like arbitrary choices that miraculously happen to justify the status quo, and ensure that the power of the rich (economic) is deemed ethical, while the power of the poor (numbers) is deemed an encroachment on freedom. This system of ethics is transparently self-serving.

> where engaging in some voluntary activity is punished by prison sentences or expropriation of wealth. That is textbook authoritarian intervention.

That's not what authoritarianism means. When society restricts some individual freedoms that's not always authoritarianism. You personally may not like it; you may be ideologically opposed to it, but that's not enough to make it authoritarian.

Otherwise, every possible society would necessarily be authoritarian for a simple reason: a society comprises more than one person. For simplicity assume there are only two. Either person A is allowed to do as they like -- including things that may restrict B's freedoms -- in which case the system is authoritarian, or there is some social mechanism in place that forbids A from behaving in this way, in which case the system is also authoritarian.

>That's not what authoritarianism means. When society restricts some individual freedoms that's not always authoritarianism. You personally may not like it; you may be ideologically opposed to it, but that's not enough to make it authoritarian.

I'm referring to the more generic meaning of authoritarianism, as in imposing authoritarian measures, from Google:

au·thor·i·tar·i·an
adjective
favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

Personal freedom means being able to do anything you want outside of violating other people's person or property without their consent. The idea of being free to act in any way other than violating the rights of others (though violence, theft, etc) is a pretty widely accepted principle of a free society.

That means any consumer protection law, that restricts the right for a party to offer a particular product/service, by fining or imprisoning those who do, is authoritarian.

We can safely assume, based on some sensible and self-evident axioms, that the adaptation is less economically optimal than the actions that would have been taken absent the authoritarian intervention.

That's such an easily solvable problem that I wonder why people even bring it up. Just distribute all the extra profit from the water sales equally among the population. The poor will get a check more than large enough to pay for the increased cost of water.

Alternatively you could just subsidize water use up to some threshold and then charge more for every additional gallon.

So then you get to have all the fun issues surrounding nationalised utilities ! (nb I personally feel there are some things that should be public goods, water being one of them, but saying it's a simple solution is naïve)

The water can be nationalized. But the government still needs to put a price on it to prevent overuse. If the price is higher than the operating costs of the water system, then they have profit they can redistribute to the people.

Metering water seems reasonable but there are upfront costs to more widespread adoption (financial + political/social) + a bureaucratic layer (with all the associated complexity/corruption issues) that would need to be implemented for metering plus nationalisation, so while I'm [quite possibly naïvely] personally in favour, it opens a very large can of worms.

But everyone can't have an equal share of water, because there is already not enough water to go around in the first place.

Unless you mean everyone will get only one cup of water. But then, the farmer will be fucked, because one cup of water is not enough to farm. And if the farmers can't farm, then you'll have another set of problems on your hand: NOT ENOUGH FOOD.

That's just nonsense. There is more than enough water for everyone's basic needs and then some. The problem is people using excessive water on their lawns, agriculture, or industry. And to some extent toilets, showers, and cleaning, which are all nice but could be reduced or cut in a crisis.

If a rich person wants to buy extra water to use on their lawn, they can. But they need to find someone willing to sell it, and offer them enough money to make it worth it.

If it really gets to the point there is only 1 cup of water per person per day, well then so be it. Everyone gets exactly 1 cup of water. That's perfectly fair. What's not fair is giving 1.5 cups to one person and 0.5 cups to another. Just because they are rich or a farmer or whatever.

Such a situation would create huge economic incentives to find more water, to conserve existing water, to reuse waste water, etc. The point is to get the benefits from a free market with incentives, but to distribute the benefits equally among the population.

There's another side benefit to desalination that nobody seems to have mentioned here yet, which is solar ponds, as you can use the resultant "waste" brine to make the required halocline. Solar ponds are a means of generating usable energy from the storage of solar energy within a body of brine. Israel actually made headway with this tech in the 80's, but shelved it as there was no real urgent need for it - but there's new interest in it as a renewable energy source.

There is a good episode of the podcast 'Econtalk' on this subject. My take-away from listening to that is that supply and demand and setting the price according to the supply would solve most of the world's water problem. Except that's not the way it's done.

They mentioned so many silly subsidies and flat out craziness going on in the water markets that it made templated C++ code seem sane in comparison :/

This ignores another key component of agriculture- nutrients in the solid. Land that hasn't had a diverse ecosystem on it for decades isn't going to have the required nutrients.

Sure you can dump additives in the ground and boost this years crop but that isn't going to create long term healthy soil which can support farming. Fertilizers are just another dependency on fossil fuels.

Water is certainly a part of terraforming a desert, but only a part of it.

Then why aren't the big problems with simple solutions solved already? If your answer is something along the lines of "politics", or "coordination is hard", or "people are stupid", I'd argue that those factors are part of the problem and a solution should account for them.

Endless economic troubles happen when governments try to repeal supply&demand or deny its existence. A topical example is the drought in California mixed in with the political distribution of water rights.

Except the market doesn't let society prioritize. In CA, a big part of the water issue was what goes to humans vs farmers. That's not something that the market should be solving, that's for policy, because things like almonds being a status symbol in China cause major issues locally and distort the picture of supply & demand.

Even beyond that, lot of those farmers bought the right to access a certain amount of water when they bought their land. Taking it away from them is like taking property away from someone in SF because they didn't pay enough for it back in the 80s.

Eminent domain is a thing. When public good demands it (or when cronyism pushes it through), we do in fact take property from private citizens.

The idea that farmers' water rights are inalienable seems absurd to me. A state can be in a drought but farmers needn't curb their usage at all?

If each suburban plot of land in California hypothetically came with a guarantee of 100k gallons of water a month, there would be no doubt that this would be cut immediately when a drought hit. It's only farmers' lobbying power that stops their water rights from being restructured wholesale.

With that said, I do think agriculture rightfully gets a lot of water allocated. Much of it seems wasted, though.

Certainly eminent domain is sometimes necessary, and I agree some form of it will probably be necessary to solve California's problem, but I wouldn't exactly associate it with "letting prices rise" (the statement by the poster who started this line of thought).

The free market had its say when these water rights were sold, taking it back from them with eminent domain so we can charge more is not the free market.

Why is that inevitable? In fact most of CA's water allocation is driven by the free market (and local counties), not the government. Unfortunately it means that things like almonds get way too much water compared to what's useful by society or locals (since much is shipped abroad), and deregulation means farmers pump water from underground that can't be replaced for temporary gains. These are just some examples of where the market fails.

Energy is a huge problem in many areas where access to freshwater is threatened. Wealthy nations can afford to get their water in whichever way they want. Nobody's going to pay for a RO plant in, say, Syria.

I urge you to look at "Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought" [0] linked to in the article. It describes mass displacement in Syria following a severe 3 year drought, which in turn have contributed to the conflict there.

While not every drought is going to lead to a civil war its a dramatic example of how the type of market adjustment you are talking about is not a smooth, painless experience.

Market forces prevented the Dust Bowl until the US govt induced settlement by farmers who used techniques that were ecologically incompatible in the longer run. It was a mistake and civilization learned from it and resources were revalued accordingly. I suppose that the US govt is a market force of sorts, but probably not what the parent comment had in mind.

I'm in the UK, and recently tried to make sense of my water bill as I've a change in how our waste is managed. We are off the sewer network with about 50 houses with a treatment works. An annual water bill from average figures for our region (different water companies), is about £400 for a two person household and £600 for four. You pay more for your waste removal than clean water intake. Waste is measured against clean water intake.

We are now looking at a figure of over a pound per day for waste removal. The figure feels steep to me. If I could separate liquids and solids easily, then actually I could dump both in the garden. If you have the space then composting seems like a great solution. And would save flushing all that clean water down the toilet.

Modern plumbing, freshwater, and waste removal is literally one of the top five inventions of all time for increasing lifespan and quality of life. You don't realize how good you have it until you go try to live in a village that doesn't have freshwater or wastewater disposal, where you have to trudge miles per day to fill up large heavy containers from sources that are already polluted anyway, and that needs to be further treated with boiling before it's safe to use.

So in that context, it's absurd to think that £1 per day is steep to get all of those benefits. Back when I had a house our water bill was way more than you're paying, and I would've been willing to pay way more still. Having fresh safe water available at the flick of a tap whenever you need it, and all waste products disposed of without spreading contagion, is a modern day miracle.

Rather than a miracle it's a partially solved engineering problem. Using potable water to transport poo seems rather wasteful, when a low tech composting approach is rather simple.

Or perhaps the sewerage network should be replaced with a multi-purpose, transport network, or some other innovation.

You can process your own waste by pumping air basically through black water, all very good. But at the same time you can just throw a turd on the compost heap if you have the room, and nature will do its thing, and you'll build up your soil.

I'd have thought that was quite simple. My partner however has IBS, and each sitting is a shit storm. They have no control and that wouldn't work for them apparently. That's the biggest barrier for us.

The problem with this kind of thinking at least in developing and undeveloped countries is water is seen as kind of right and most of the time expected it to be free. Most of the time there will be a political out-lash if water is commodified.

Desalination plants are expensive and take a long time to build. It's not something that can be built to react to market forces. The Sorek desalination plant in the article started construction in January 2011 and was operational in October 2013 at a cost of 400m USD. It's owned by the government. So, really, the market did not solve this.

Do you really need to live in a desert? Why would a human civilisation choose to live in a place that lacks an essential ingredient for life? It seems we choose to do this in deserts all over the world so there must be a reason.

99.9% of the people living in Phoenix and Las Vegas aren't there to mine minerals. This is just a complete non sequitur. For an actual example of towns that exist primarily to supply labor for resource extraction, look at the Canadian towns in the Alberta tar-sands region. They are much, much smaller.

C'mon, everyone knows what drinkable water is. You can technically also drink boiling water, or battery acid for that matter, but nobody would classify those under the category "drinkable liquids" which is what we're talking about here.

I've used reverse osmosis unit for years. new unit is less than $100usd it paid itself in months. maintenance is cheap.

my RO has kinda low efficiency. 4 units of water in, i get 1 unit of clean drinkable water. 3 units are 'waste' (don't believe what socmed says, it's not dirty). the waste water is used for laundry, aquarium and gardening. my fishes and vegs are thriving.

to test purity, just plunge the ohm meter probes into a cup of ro water. if the resistence is in 1MOhm, it's pretty pure. mountain/mineral water bought from store is about 150kOhm. after drinking ro water for a while, store-bought water tastes slightly salty.

my house pumps water from ground (well-pump). for a family of 6, i need 1m3 of water. that's about half hour of 500W pump. an ro unit (40W) runs about 3 hours for 5gal bottle. so give or take, 1/2kWH or about 15KW per month. that's about $1 or $2 for my water need per month.

if i must buy raw water (such as living in an apartment), it's about $1 per m3, so about $30 per month; however, i get drinkable water too. ro units are portable. i saved $28/mo in water expense after moving from apartment.

flashing back from memory, i used to lug around 3 5gal water-cooler bottle from stores to my apartment every 3 days (i had 3 bottles). it was not pleasant and wasted time (go to store, queue, lug heavy bottles back)

ro unit has relay so you don't have to sit and wait for it to fill. it automatically cuts power to the pump when its internal clean-water-tank is full.

I was instructed (from professional chemists) to NOT drink 1 MOhm ( or other highly-purified) RO water. At that purity, particularly when hot, it will leach metals and other compounds from pipes, pots, cups, etc. Maybe it's worth dropping a little salt into the water after purification?

I'm also surprised that you use the waste water on your aquarium. In my experience, fish are MUCH more sensitive to water quality than humans are. This is particularly true for corals in saltwater tanks. In fact, many aquarium stores sell RO-purified water for fish tanks!

No, the point is we never normally drink totally pure water, we nearly always drink mineral water. Mineral water does in fact taste better most of the time. Pure H20 is going to start dissolving all sorts of stuff from it's surrounding, making it taste odd.

I do not see why extremely pure water would leach metals any more than tapwater would. Chemically it should not matter. All species will reach equilibrium between the surface of the container and the liquid and if dilute they will not care about one another. That equilibrium will be reached faster if the temperature is higher.

What is true is that you should not drink hot water from pipes because hot water does leach metals, tapwater or otherwise.

I built a CVD lab that had aluminum deposition chambers plumbed into a DI water cooling system. The water was fed from a purifier that provided 18MΩ-cm water.

The water corroded the aluminum chamber cooling passages, leaving aluminum hydroxide behind. This conversion of metallic aluminum to a gelatinous, clogging hydroxide was what alerted us to the problem. Feed pressure (regulated) was fine, but flow rates fell and chambers heated up.

We had to wire brush all cooling channels, a total pain. We ran on tap water for a couple of weeks while we researched the issue, and had very little corrosion but had other issues (mineral deposits).

Finally, we reverted to 18MΩ water and added ~10% volume of ethylene glycol (antifreeze, basically). Once we "degraded" the water purity with glycol, our corrosion problems stopped. It was very counterintuitive.

Here's an industry source that has a little bit to say about the corrosive properties of pure water:

It's not a theoretical issue, and not limited to RO water supplies. Here in Portland Oregon the municipal water source is Bull Run Watershed high up in the foothills of Mt. Hood, some 26 miles east of downtown.

The collected water is basically similar to distilled water since it's formed directly from cloud/fog condensate. Consequently the default pH is ~6.8-7.0, which leaches lead from old plumbing. The federal government forced the city to add sodium hydroxide to increase the pH to ~8.0 and reduce corrosion.

Obviously city water has very little dissolved solids which in principle could have health implications re: Ca, Mg intake. Diet is normally the main source of these minerals, not clear how much additional risk is attributable to low mineral content of household water.

Most people here consider our water to be very palatable as is and are reluctant to have further modifiers applied to it. If any new federal requirements are attempted it's likely to elicit a lot of controversy and pushback.

How could that be the case? Tap water is nowhere close to mineral saturation. It should make an astronomically small difference. If anything, it could be less corrosive due to the higher resistance.

I do see a possibility for it to be slightly more corrosive in pipes under specific circumstances, due to the lack of anything forming a passivating layer on the long run. But for teeth I have a hard time believing this.

Are you kidding me?! Tap water has to go through dirty city pipes. Of course it's saturated with minerals. Not only that but Fluorine or Chlorine or whatever halogen they choose to kill the bacteria and protozoans with.

Dissolution is based on concentration of existing solute. This isn't a binary effect of complete saturation like you suggest. Pure water has enough diffusion pressure to cause significantly more dissolution of a tooth's mineral lining than hard water. Diffusion pressure of pure distilled water is 1236 atm.

Quote on quote: "If some solute is dissolved in water its diffusion pressure decreases. The difference between diffusion pressure of pure water and solution is called diffusion pressure deficit (DPD)."

i do have cavities on back of my lower jaws; however, it's not due to RO water. should RO water is causing this, the damage distribution should be uniform -> my other teeth should be equally damaged.

i still have other teeth intact, no holes, despite using ro water for 8 years or so.

i think there's the cause of my holes. i had wisdom teeth very late in age. my brushing pattern wasn't sufficient. moreover, i was addicted to oatmeal power drink and didn't brush after. those sugary flakes seem to linger on my back jaws.

yudkin book, "pure, white and deadly" discusses this. children who drink sugary vs eating candies. same sugar; however, those eating candies get more cavities simply because candies stick between teeth ... think twinkies

on interesting part of the book is about the slave in sugar plantations. they did eat raw sugar; however, the slaves didn't get the same disastrous level of disease as the masters, who eat refined sugar.

Cavity damage isn't uniform though. It depends on location of exposure and the way the mouth salivates. It makes sense that the cavities are toward the back of the tongue. Anyhow, I would be careful. Just get a potassium chloride rock and throw it in the water. No biggie.

i used to store hot water in thermos that the inside glass got stain from hard water (apartment water was hard, contains a lot of mineral)

after i got a son, we replaced hard water with ro water, including the thermos. well, baby is important, right?

over time (months), the stains are gone, the glass inside the thermos got cleaner.

so yeah, ro water being soft water probably cancels out the stains from hard water previously used.

on waste water for aquarium:
it's because you misrepresent 'waste water'.
water in an ro unit gets filtered four times (must go thru 4 different filters). the first is sediment, and the last is the ro membrane. can't remember the middles.

the sediment filter gets brown over time and need to be replaced (cheap, ~$1 per cylinder). so there's some impurities captured.

after last filter, the membrane, the water that fails to pass becomes 'waste water'. it's actually clear, tasteless, just didn't pass the ro membrane.

so ro waste water is actually cleaner than the input water.
my fishes are okay with water from well. naturally, they should be okay too with water that's cleaner than well water.

on heavy metal, fishes are very sensitive to cu, not so much for pb. so if fishes are healthy and not jittery or die after a day, the water should be okay.

i also bought ro unit for my soft-water fishes: neon tetra. accidently, i found that human can drink ro water too ;)

That's really cool. Do you face any regulatory issues for your pumping? Do you have to own water rights on your land to pump from the ground? Have you ever had your groundwater tested to ensure that there are no contaminants that might not be filtered by RO?

FWIW, it is typical for anyone who lives outside of a city to have well water. I would be shocked if there were any regulatory issues with doing so anywhere in the US, or any issue with water rights. There are millions of people doing it right now.

I think hypothetically when the system is first installed it's supposed to be tested, but I don't put a lot of faith in that. Interestingly, in contrast to parent, it's pretty standard for the water to be totally unfiltered. Generally, you have an electric pump that cuts on any time the water pressure drops below a certain level to maintain it. Honestly I've no idea how much it costs me a month, but it's pretty nominal. My electric bill runs about $125/mo and most of that is the AC.

(In case you were wondering, sewer is dealt with via a septic system, which still amazes me. All your wastewater drains into a ~1000 gallon tank buried in the ground. At the top of the tank are field lines, which distribute water and drain it over a wide area. Solids are rapidly broken down by bacteria in the tank and quickly dissolve. These systems can be maintenance-free for 25 years, though the septic industry recommends you pump them every several years to remove "sludge" that slowly accumulates at the bottom.)

to get water from ground, drill a hole about an inch diameter so long pipe can be inserted.

if you can get good water within 9 meters, that's great because standard pump can suck up to 9 meter down.

if you get salty, rusty, smelly colored water, drill deeper. 30m is pretty much max depth for home-use jet pump and normally you get clean water.

you can get deeper too and use bigger hole too; however, that's when you need permit. industry and hotel often do because they need a lot of water very fast.

water collected from pump can be stored in large tank above roof. then gravity plays it part delivering tank-water.

there's a switch on the tank that cuts electricity to the pump when a buoy inside the tank float up to a certain level. so, my switch is simpler water-level-based, not pressure-based.

from empty to full, my pump runs about 30 min. my pump is 1 horse power or about 750w. so for a month that would be 30 * 30/60 * 750w = 11.25 kwh.

for disposals, my house get two lines. one for washing, bathing, etc and that goes to city sewer. another is for human waste that goes to house ground sewage tank.

sewage tank is basically an unsealed empty space inside ground. bacteria decompose human waste and the water just get filtered by ground beneath. the tank gets full over time and sewer tank service can come and suck the sewage tank.

nothing wrong, when i was a kid, i often drink well water directly uncooked. i filter it because now i can and i have a son.

well water are already filtered by nature. the deeper the well, the cleaner the water is. think spring water, which is rain water filtered by hundred-meter rock hill.

water in apartment often smell funky and can't be trusted (management mix water from its own water-treatment with government water).

i know for sure how nasty the apartment water because i often pour pure-strength (not grocery-bought) HCl or NaOH (wait for a day so they don't cancel out) down the drain when it's clogged in hope they dissolve matters.

the pipe still sometimes gets clogged after harsh chemical treatments so lately i just use thick-liquid SLS (or use downy super in the USA, or any concentrated detergent) and pour hot water. it moves clog point down further the apartment pipe. slippery it is!

i used to have my sink flooded within 10 seconds. now it's after 60 seconds, leaving plenty of time to do quick washings.

In Israel, it's mostly a triumph of politics over economics - Jordan, Israel, and the PA have cooperated in developing desalination plants [1] in part in order to defuse conflicts over water. Water allocations have historically been a zero-sum competition in the region, so when there's a chance (however expensive) to just throw money at the problem to make it go away, everyone's willing to play along.

I think it's quite a mistake to dismiss public infrastructure that efficiently provides a vital resource in needed quantities as somehow triumphing over economics. Economic theory seems to be supported here, in that infrastructure now exists to meet record demand, at a higher marginal price than earlier supplies. Did you mean to say that it's simply expensive?

The story said that the pipes Israel is complaining about had been recently installed by the Americans and worked fine. The real issue is that Israel wants quid pro quo construction of water resources for unlawful settlements.

So, Israel is holding back water because Palestinians refuse to give up any more of their land to "settlers". Who said politics had triumphed?

EDIT: And from your linked article, the real issue gets a single mention "The Palestinian refusal to sit down with Israelis, means that the committee has not met for over five years." The article implies a broken pipe keeps everyone from getting water, when it's really a refusal to give any more land to illegal settlements.

> Palestinians say they are prevented from using their own water resources by a belligerent military power, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy water from their occupiers at inflated prices.

> Israel allocates to its citizens, including those living in settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law, between three and five times more water than the Palestinians.

I'm sure Palestine would love to be in Israel's position right now. Given how Israel, depending on the Palestinian policy of the time, alternates between stealing Palestinian land, bombing it, or preventing goods from entering or leaving, it's in no position to complain about poorly maintained infrastructure.

* A lot of it is. Most people do not contest that. However, a lot of land being taken over the past few decades consists of illegal settlements... And buffer zones for said illegal settlements.

* Plenty of people - say, American Japanese had their land, money, and property seized during the second world war - and they haven't received a dollar in compensation for it. That doesn't give them the right to do the same to other people.

> Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s.

How much of that price drop is due to lower energy prices? How sustainable is the power source?

Even with significant efficiency improvements (3X), shifting from local freshwater sources to desalination would have a massive energy requirements.[1] For such a bold claim ("the Desalination Era is Here"), this article has a rather lightweight examination of the environmental impacts.

They're quoting 58 cents for a thousand liters. Even if we pretend that is based on free power, we can add the cost of a solar plant and produce each thousand liters for under a dollar. So desalination is completely sustainable.

That's like saying all high-energy industries are sustainable, if we assume sufficient solar build-out. That's a big if. We can't just assume this project is going to be powered sustainably. It's something the article should have explored.

> That's like saying all high-energy industries are sustainable, if we assume sufficient solar build-out.

Sure. Just about all high-energy industries that don't use up limited resources are sustainable.

The desalination itself is sustainable. That's a different question from where the plant buys power, or where it buys parts, or whether the employees use gasoline to get to work and back. There's nothing tying it to buying sustainable power or unsustainable power; that's a significantly different question and while it could fit in the article, it's by no means necessary for the article.

Every multi-factor process has some limiting factor. Your overall capability is defined by that limiting factor (constraint). Ecology knows this as Leibig's Law of the Minimum.

There's a finite energy flux available on Earth. Excluding nuclear, there are solar, geothermal, and tidal fluxes. Nuclear introduces fission (uranium, plutonium, breeder), or fusion (yet unproven: hydrogen). The only reasonably unconstrained energy sources might be breeder or fusion, and I'm not sure either is long-term viable for other reasons (too long to go into now, though waste / "hygiene factors" play large).

The present roughly 17 TW of power consumed by humans would requite a nothin-but-solar region 800 km on a side.

Factor in increased energy for the 6 billion people not living in the US or EU, and increased energy demands of the 8 bilion people (7 presently, plus one more) who'd like to live at US-standard-of-living levels, and you're increasing demand significantly. 85 TW just for population and standard of living would require 3.1 million km^2 -- about a third of the land area of the United States, Australia, or the Sahara Desert. With nothing in it but solar plant. Wall to wall.

Oh, and 1/5 of that needs replacing. Every. Single. Year.

Solar panels, for numerous systemic reasons, degrade with time, and have about a 20 year effective life.

(Research on extending panel life strikes me as more useful than increasing efficiency or massive cost reductions.)

Keep in mind that there are other creatures on this planet and they've got their own demands for land use. We may rely on them in complex ways.

If you're building more power plant capacity than you can sustain, any industry relying on that power won't be sustainable.

1. The roofs of houses and solar cells over roads would cover the need for everything but (maybe) really high population cities. The area to collect sun isn't really a problem, especially not when they get more efficient over time.

2. "and 1/5 of [solar cells?] needs replacing. Every. Single. Year." Huh? The technical life length of solar cells are much higher, as you note yourself.

And certainly, solar cells are not that useful in a Scandinavian winter, because there is just not enough sun. But as it seems now, unless General Fusion or a similar fusion project works out, solar will in twenty++ years supply electricity to most people's normal energy use on the planet. (Few live up in the north.)

Residential power is probably easy with solar. A mill near here uses more power than the 40,000 person county (and I think also uses the waste heat from the power plant, so the nominal electric output of the plant doesn't capture the energy required to run the mill)).

Still, I think the US standard of living is unnecessarily energy intensive (cheap buildings heated/cooled more than necessary, lots of beef, vanity carburetors, it goes on and on and on so all the little things actually add up). It's pretty likely that the US can substantially reduce consumer energy use without really having any impact on standard of living.

David Macay's Without the Hot Air, looking at the UK, is somewhat more subdued.

Electricity is generally about 33% of energy end-use. Transport is another third, and various uses, mostly industrial and heating, the remainder. Generation would have to increase significantly to cover this. Storage would have further efficiency losses. And then there are the capital requirements.

> Just about all high-energy industries that don't use up limited resources are sustainable.

This is an odd statement. Don't most high energy industries use fossile fuels? Such fuels are non sustainable.

We are not yet at the point of such plentiful sustainable energy deployments that we can separate the notion of power utilization from source. High levels of utilization, in absence of specific plans to create sustainable energy supply, must be assumed to exploit non sustainable sources.

> We are not yet at the point of such plentiful sustainable energy deployments that we can separate the notion of power utilization from source.

Sure we are, if we exclude processes that are only barely profitable and also locked in price. Anything else can pay the small premium to get non-fossil power. For a technology to be sustainable doesn't require that specific implementations buy green energy. If it's viable to do so, that's good enough.

Well, desalination is usually of most urgent practical application in areas which happen to have a lot of deserts (Israel, for example, is 60% desert by land area). Which is exactly the kind of places that are perfect for a large-scale solar build-out from economic perspective.

And I would imagine that desalination plants don't have to work around the clock. If they can be wound down and restarted relatively fast, they can track the sun, and only produce (and store) freshwater while that solar power is flowing in.

You have situations like at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, which is in the Mojave Desert, where the project had to be scaled down to preserve some desert tortoise habitat.

If you're placing solar panels in a sand desert, you have to deal with sandstorms and shifting dunes.

The more land you use for solar panels or heliostats, the more difficult it becomes to find additional usable land.

> "Concerns about the impacts of the Ivanpah Solar thermal project led the developers to hire some 100 biologists and spend US$22 million caring for the tortoises on or near the site during construction."

It's a bit sad, though - the Victorian government was in a no-win situation with that one. A nine-year drought with the water reserves to a city of 4M people down to 15%? Something had to be done, and the common refrain of "drought will break next year" had been heard every year for the previous half-decade. The plant was over-expensive and should have been bought in a progressive manner rather than full-capacity-at-once, but Melbourne was actually in danger of running out of water. They joke in the video "why not build a dam where it's actually raining?", but the point was, there'd been barely any rain for a decade. There wasn't anywhere that fit that description (and Melbourne has tons of water reserves outside of long drought conditions).

Of course, because Fate is an arsehole, they got the construction underway, and the next year the drought broke. If the drought hadn't broken, people wouldn't be so quick to condemn the desal plant...

Where is the power coming from? Desalination can only be as efficient and sustainable as the power source. It's not surprising if Israel can build massive desalination plants dependent on cheap fossil fuel power.

This is just trading water now for more CO2 added to the atmosphere, worsening the underlying problem.

This story is hopeful but also worrying... I am so glad I am not living in a region where my drinking water depends completely on non-renewables. I hope energy hogs like desalination can be used as a buffer to reduce storage needs... I.e. build over capacity and run them when energy is plentiful.

Average rainfall in Tel Aviv - 528mm/year, that's about 50mm less than Jerusalem - and London. Now, a lot of the country is a desert, but even Beersheba gets an average of 400mm. Only the far south is really dry.

Not that Israel didn't need its desalination system, it might be the only good and/or competent thing our government has done in recent years, but it's not a very dry country in its inhabited areas.

For some perspective: LA county uses about ~50 Million cubic meters of water per year. The largest Israeli desalinization plant is ~225 Million cubic meters per year. The entire state of California uses ~50 Billion cubic meters of water per year. Very rough numbers

My take is, water is a commodity (mostly) in California. I'm a bit skeptical of residential users paying dear for desalinated water in order for agricultural users to have a larger share of the 'free' water.

California's GDP is estimated at 1,800 billion. Economic activity coming from agriculture is estimated at about 100 billion. Given an average economic growth rate of 2.5% per year for California, losing all agriculture would set California's growth back about 2 years.

Nobody wants to do that, and there are all sorts of complex legal issues around water rights. But push come to shove, California could survive just fine without its agricultural sector.

Agriculture brings may bring in only 5% of the state's economy, but if every single piece of food eaten in California had to be imported, it would cost a lot more then 5% of its economy.

If food were grown by magic, without employing any people, and it could all be sold at cost, it would contribute 0% to the state's economy. Does that mean that it would make economic sense to immediately stop growing all that food? Of course not! The fact that growing food is so cheap is a good thing!

To amplify your point, excepting water, the San Joaquin Valley in particular has the best climate and input factors in the possibly the world for producing high value crops at low cost and low environmental impact. If we could supply another 50-100M acre feet of water to the aqueduct system amazing thinks could happen.

My quick calculation is the biggest of these desal plants would only feed 25,000 acres of almonds. There are 1M acres +/- of almonds in California, if we wanted to double nut protein production in California (the leading global exporter of almonds) you would need about 50 of the plants described not just three.

Who wants to build the giga-desal plant to feed the Clifton Court Forebay?

The alternatives to crops being raised in Calfornia aren't limited just to the lost ag revenue, but to the expense of transporting in food, the loss of fresh fruits and vegetables (California specialises in "table" crops (vegetables), fruit, and grapes especially, knock-on effects of worsened nutrition and reduced food quality, price increases resulting from withdrawal of California ag land, etc.

Simply figuring out where you'd source that food from becomes problematic. Seattle is the only West Coast port with significant capacity and growing regions near it (Portland might do in a squeeze), plus growing area. There's no assurance that California crops, particularly greens and vegetables, would be suited to more northern climates and growing conditions, though adaptations might be made.

And there's considerable room for adjustment in California's crop mix. No need to grow alfalfa in the desert, as a perennial crop, that's easy to fallow in dry years. Tree crops are multi-decadal investments, and will not simply fail to bear fruit without water, but will die -- one of the real crimes of the almond-planting spree around the state. You lose cropping flexibility.

(There's a study I turned up some months back, either IRS or Federal Reserve, on tree crop asset lifetimes -- some bearing orange trees in Southern California are approaching or over 300 years old.)

And it is little appreciated that federal agriculture subsidies are structured the way that they are because maintaining food security was seen as necessary for the stability of our country.

To see why you have to go back to the Dust Bowl, and then the prospect of severe famines in Europe at the end of WW II. It turns out that if you have 10% more food than people need, food is cheap. But make that 10% less and food becomes very expensive, people starve, and you get political unrest.

> losing all agriculture would set California's growth back about 2 years

This is a superficial analysis. It assumes that California's agriculture could be easily replaced. Not to mention that whatever replaces it may face the same issue with desalination. In actuality the entire country is dependent on California agriculture to a large extent and "The loss of California’s output would create a dire situation for at least a decade."[1]

In general, it's a foolish idea for regions to give up agricultural capability because the fickle nature of international politics and economics means it is next to impossible to always guarantee food supply through trade.

What if your current comparative advantage gets lost due to development elsewhere? Your exports will no longer earn you the foreign currency you require to import food (look at Venuzvela for a recent example or the disaster of Haiti where IMF prescribed food imports or India's famines of the 1960s)

This is the reason nations heavily subsidize agriculture even when they can rely purely on imports.

A metric ton (1.1 tons) of #1 Winter Wheat ranges from $140 to $160. Israeli desal water is about $0.52 cubic meter or 260 gallons. Using the 1 ton wheat is 216,000 gallons of water, it comes to about $430 per ton using the desalinated water.

I've heard that just as big as their desalination efforts are their water reuse efforts. All that sewage we work so hard to get rid of? Turns out that's still fresh water. Sort of. It's just got some other stuff in it is all.

Those numbers are only for percentage of treated sewage used for irrigation, not percentage of total reclaimed water from sewage.
To be fair, Israel doesn't practice potable reuse at all, compared to Singapore, Windhoek in Namibia, GWRS in Orange County, or Big Spring in Texas(direct potable reuse).

tldr; water was used as an excuse by the British to limit immigration to Israel, so from the earliest onset of the formation of Israel, Israel has been trying to tackle the problem of water use inefficiency.

The Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) is the world's largest system for indirect potable reuse. The system takes highly treated wastewater that would have previously been discharged into the Pacific Ocean and purifies it using a three-step advanced treatment process.